Development appears to be central to John Tory’s transit plans
There is nothing wrong with that, but why aren’t we talking more about it?

thestar.com
By EDWARD KEENAN
March 13, 2017

It’s strange the things we don’t talk much about in city political debates. For instance, in the most recent in a never-ending series of flare-ups at city hall about the Scarborough subway, we heard a lot about what the people of Scarbrough “deserve,” and about travel times, and about new riders at peak hour. We heard about the service extended to people in Rosedale and we even heard about poison-tipped umbrellas and exploding cigars.

But we didn’t hear too much debate about real estate development prospects, considering that boosting those prospects is the primary rationale behind the plan. When the one-stop subway was announced, the planning department that developed it offered that as its main argument: that a one-seat connection to the big east-west citywide subway line would spark the complete redevelopment of the entire area, bringing lots of new offices and workplaces to the town centre district, transforming it into a thriving urban centre.

Indeed, I think that is the strongest argument in the plan’s favour, as I’ve written before. If it will indeed spur that kind of development (revitalizing the area, creating a new commercial hub, and providing jobs in a area that would create large amounts of two-way transit traffic during the peak hours) in a way that other transit would not - which is a big if - then it may well be worth the premium paid for it and the sacrifice of some other goals on that corridor that alternate plans offer. But I’m not sure of its prospects for success in that, partly because the central rationale has played such a small part in a debate that focuses mostly on other factors.

When you look closely, commercial real estate development is one of the most central goals of Mayor John Tory’s administration. Encouraging office and real estate construction is, in fact, the skeleton key that unlocks the reasoning behind virtually all of the mayor’s biggest transportation infrastructure projects.

The background documents that formed the basis for Mayor Tory’s SmartTrack plan were premised explicitly on spurring commercial development in areas of the GTA where there was room for growth and a dearth of transit. That’s why SmartTrack was designed to connect to the Airport Corporate Centre in Mississauga, the former Unilever lands on the edge of the Don Valley, and Markham - because that is where the prospects for rapid office development were seen to be high. The mayor even pitched his funding plan for it during the campaign on taxes collected strictly from new commercial development in the corridor. He was that confident, because enabling new commercial development was the whole route’s reason for being. Through various changes to what SmartTrack is (and how it will be paid for) those areas continue to be central to the plan, presumably for the same reason.

The Unilever site owned by First Gulf - where the plan is to build 11.5 million square feet of new commercial and office space, enough to house 50,000 jobs - is a particularly illustrative case. In addition to being a central part of SmartTrack’s logic, it plays a role in other major transportation debates. Many will remember that it was First Gulf who first proposed the Gardiner Expressway “hybrid” plan that the mayor later championed and city council adopted at a cost of over $1 billion. The hybrid opens up access to First Gulf’s site while still allowing easy highway access to it.

Meanwhile, the rerouting and evolution of the planned subway relief line to run under Queen St. was explained in part by the desire to “Support major redevelopment opportunities, such as the Unilever site,” which will now have a stop on that line according to current plans.

In an interview on Newstalk1010 recently, the mayor also named the Waterfront LRT as a project he expected to be well advanced by next year - the “Waterfront Transit Reset” document from late 2015 lists serving the First Gulf site as one of the goals of the LRT project, although perhaps in a later phase.

Anyhow, taken together, we have the route of the Gardiner and the relief line, the entire concept of SmartTrack, and the one-stop Scarborough subway extension plan - billions of dollars of transportation planning - all motivated largely or primarily by the goal of serving new office development. Perhaps I have missed it, but it doesn’t seem to me like those development prospects and that goal featured prominently in the debates about them.

Those of a cynical bent could look at this and suggest the mayor and the city are acting here primarily to enrich developers by spending billions to serve their interests. Certainly these transportation plans do serve the interests of some developers - which is why in some cases they have hired lobbyists and funded groups to support the mayor’s plans.

But I think the idea of spurring rapid growth in new commercial districts, where people will work and shop and play and sometimes live, in different, currently underdeveloped areas of Toronto, is also a generally good city-building goal. It’s also hard to do - as the example of Waterfront Toronto’s decades long redevelopment and revitalization projects downtown attest.

One big question, given how prominent a role this goal serves in guiding so many of the city’s biggest capital projects, is why aren’t we discussing it more? Perhaps we should, because the other big question arises when trying to evaluate these projects in light of that goal: will it work?