Priority should be alternative transit routes into downtown

While some may consider low ridership projections for the Scarborough subway extension a crisis, a much higher estimate might be an even bigger crisis.

Thestar.com
June 2, 2016
By Edward Keenan

The gasp-inducing revelation from Tuesday night’s big debut of the now-studied and recommended Scarborough subway extension plan, the number you may have already heard, the one everyone puts in headlines, is the projected ridership. Peak hour, peak direction (the money-shot measurement in transit numbers), the one-stop extension from Kennedy to Scarborough Town Centre is expected to carry 7,300 people.

The thing about this number that makes people raise their eyebrows (perhaps after they’ve smashed those eyebrows repeatedly onto the table in front of them in frustration) is that it is in line with what a bus route might be expected to carry. And that it is roughly half as many people as the extension was projected to carry back when city council approved the subway idea. And that most critics of the subway plan predicted this - said the debated numbers before were sketchy, said an LRT could handle the load. 7,300 people is about 20 per cent of the capacity of a subway. As critics said before, trains will be travelling that new (long, long, long) stretch of track mostly empty.

But consider this: you don’t actually want a subway to be entirely full during the morning rush hour when it leaves the station at the end of the line. If 45,000 per hour were boarding at Scarborough Town Centre, no one would be able to get on the train at Kennedy. An extension is part of a line, not all of it. For the same year, the peak hour, peak direction ridership out of the existing Kipling station, at the other end of the same line, is expected to be only 6,000. Ridership to and from Kipling is lower than that today, and no one spends a lot of time talking about the Kipling Boondoggle we’ve been saddled with. 7,300 boarding at one stop at the end of the line is not a disaster. The total daily ridership of that section of line, 31,000, would make Scarborough Town Centre busier than all but seven Bloor-Danforth stations are today.

See, there are a few additional numbers you need for context. One is the cost of building the extension, about $2 billion - which is roughly twice what the entire Sheppard subway line cost to build. Another is the number of new peak hour riders the extension is expected to attract - people who aren’t already on the TTC. That number is 4,500. Which means this new line will expand access to transit for people in Scarborough at a construction cost of about $444,000 per new rider. That is a lot of cash.

But, the proposed (and, for a while, approved) LRT it replaces was expected to cost $1.4 billion. Granted, it had more stops and would have been paid for entirely by the provincial government, but the absurd and winding path of political hedging and compromise that turned that into this subway also delivered the federal and municipal dollars now slotted to add an 18-stop Eglinton East LRT now projected to serve an additional 43,400 riders a day (similar to today’s Sheppard subway daily totals).

Those numbers give people something to marvel at, rage at, puzzle over, think on. Some city councillors have said these numbers might cause second thoughts - though honestly we’re on, like, 15th thoughts by now - about the subway extension plan.

But here’s the punch line: while that low ridership number might cause a cost-benefit analysis crisis for some, a number much higher than that might be an even bigger crisis. Because the existing line is almost full already - today, if you go to Coxwell station in the morning, not even halfway to downtown, you will often see people waiting on the platform as trains too full to board pass through. Worse yet, Bloor-Danforth is a feeder line for a massive number of commuters, and the line it feeds, at Yonge, is even fuller. Subways at Yonge heading south in the morning are like a Size 0 dress on a professional wrestler - if anyone in it were to eat a single cracker, the whole structure might burst apart. The opening of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT might rip open the seams on the Yonge line before any Scarborough extension ever feeds it a single passenger.

In a bit of conveniently timed inconvenience, the fire near Yonge station that took much of the Bloor-Danforth line out of commission Wednesday morning demonstrated the other, potentially worsening problem with our constant efforts to pack more people onto our overburdened existing lines: when they are delayed, the city is paralyzed. The traffic along Bloor and adjacent routes hijacked the mornings of car commuters and transit users alike as people and buses flooded the road attempting to move in the right direction.

Which all means that today - and even more so if the subway extension is built, even more so still if the subway were ever to attract the number of riders people hope would justify its cost - our priority needs to be alternate routes into downtown. Tuesday night’s presentation offered two of those: its brief mentions of the SmartTrack commuter rail plan that is baked into the projections and assumptions and the relief subway line that would run down Pape and across Eastern and Queen.

The relief line, long trumpeted as a priority by planners, TTC managers and transit experts, appears to be coming into focus with a route and a ballpark $3.2 billion price tag. SmartTrack is still more up in the air, with a couple of configurations open to more study and negotiation with Metrolinx. But both are further behind in their processes than this so-long-debated Scarborough line.

The loudest voices just now are opposed to that Scarborough extension because they fear it will be an expensive white elephant that is too empty. But if we don’t make the relief options a higher priority, the problem might turn out to be that the low ridership is still too high, just a big expense to further push the subway system past its breaking point.