Whether subway or LRT, Scarborough has to be just the start

Toronto’s transit plans start as vast networks and end as stubs. Don’t let it happen again, writes Edward Keenan.

Thestar.com
July 11, 2016
By Edward Keenan

There are two certainties in Toronto political debate: the Scarborough subway and taxes.

What about death, you say? Ha! No such luck. No one who has closely watched city hall over the past decade believes fighting about these topics will ever die.

And so, we reported this week, a proposal for new taxes of some form is coming back to city hall in the fall. And Subway Bowl CXXXVIII will be contested at the city council meeting starting Tuesday. There, once again, councillors will be asked to vote to either move ahead with work on the new, more expensive, less expansive extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line to Scarborough Town Centre, or to revert to the twice-abandoned former plan for a new six-stop LRT to the same destination.

I wrote recently about what I think is the most reasonable case to be made for the subway plan - an argument that depends on a series of other conditions for its logic. And in the end I remain unpersuaded - I think, as I have for years, that the LRT plan would probably accomplish most of the city-building and transit network goals as well or better. The case was put well in a recent op-ed by Councillors Paul Ainslie and Josh Matlow.

I won’t rehash all of those arguments on both sides here - if you care at all, it’s likely you are intimately familiar with them already, and it’s also likely you have already made your mind up which side you’re on. My opinion is that the subway option would be a mistake - and an expensive one - and that Scarborough commuters and the city’s goals would both be better served by the alternative proposal.

But my big fear about the debate Tuesday (and beyond) is not that the subway extension is approved and built. It is that nothing else that’s been proposed in addition to and alongside it will be built.

Right now, the mayor and the city’s chief planner have been pitching the subway extension as an inextricable part of a big network plan for Scarborough, which also includes a new 25-stop Eglinton East LRT to U of T’s Scarborough campus, new SmartTrack service in one GO corridor, and a relief subway line to run on Pape and Queen Sts. All that is part of an even broader transit network plan that’s emerged more clearly, which includes SmartTrack in the west end, too, including an LRT on Eglinton West to the airport, an LRT line on Finch West, and LRT service across the waterfront. All of this, on paper, to be built and in service in about 15 years.

That larger plan, whatever you think of any one part of it, is both remarkable and necessary. And it’s expensive. Like, $30 billion or more expensive.

There’s a line of thinking I’ve entertained that says the Scarborough subway extension piece of that plan - which over political generations has taken on a sort of mythological symbolic dimension - is the expensive-but-necessary political price of support for the whole network. That even if in practice it is not remarkably better than the alternative, or not enough to justify the likely premium in cost, it has psychological value for members of the public and of council that unlocks a willingness to really get down to building all of what we need.

Mary Kay gave her good sales representatives pink Cadillacs not because they needed that much car to sell cosmetics, but because the luxury Cadillac brand signified something - a level of seriousness, and success, and pride. It said, “We’re in business.” If a one-seat connection to the Bloor subway says the same thing to some key political constituencies, and makes them evangelists and builders for a whole, big city-wide network, then maybe that’s a price worth paying.

Except that is not, in my observation, how things work in Toronto transit politics.

The way things work, or have worked, is this:

A giant subway network plan to develop urban centres in Etobicoke, Scarborough, and North York was proposed in 1985 and refined in 1990, which included subway lines along Eglinton West, a Downtown Relief Line, and a Sheppard subway from Yonge to Scarborough Town Centre. After all the fighting and debating and budget cutting, that plan actually produced the short, underused Sheppard subway to Don Mills.

An expansive network of LRTs to serve underserved areas of the city was proposed in 2007 that would see new lines all the way across Eglinton, on Finch West, Sheppard East, Eglinton East up into Malvern, Don Mills, Jane, and the western waterfront. What actually got put under construction was a shortened version of the Eglinton Crosstown. The Finch West LRT appears like it may possibly be built, too. Maybe.

The history is that a big network is proposed, and one small part - often the part considered most politically inescapable by key members of the provincial government - gets built. We abandon the whole idea of being in business, but we keep the pink Cadillac.

Now. Consider that today, some councillors and the mayor have cited the “over my dead body” support of a provincial cabinet minister as a major argument in favour of the subway extension. And the only part of the vast proposed network that is considered “funded” is the subway extension.

My big fear is not that we build a one-stop subway extension instead of the LRT line I think would be better. It is that we build a one-stop subway extension instead of a whole network we desperately need. If the extension comes as part of that whole planned network, as it’s pitched, then the city will still be far better off in the 2030s and beyond, and the what-coulda-been discussion about that six-kilometre stretch will be a historical footnote. But if the network idea is ditched by subway supporters as soon as we get on to the next part of the ever-present conversation about the taxes needed to pay for it, then it really may turn out to be a historic disaster.