Toronto’s councillors bury themselves in Scarborough’s subway

The comparison to LRT will not be made as Mayor John Tory and his team vote down the request for information.

Thestar.com
March 28, 2017
By Edward Keenan

There’s something that probably ought to be cleared up. There’s a perception out there - it arose during Tuesday’s city council meeting debating (again) the extension to the Bloor subway line to the Scarborough Town Centre - that proponents of the competing LRT proposal have somehow delayed the construction of the subway for years.

Councillor James Pasternak said so again in a speech, saying subway skeptics have “delayed and delayed” before Councillors Gord Perks and Shelley Carroll loudly objected. In truth, as they pointed out, there has been no delay of the subway extension at all. Since it was proposed by Karen Stintz and Glenn De Baeremaeker as an alternative to the LRT plan that was to be constructed, it has proceeded, gaining approval by council, and having that approval affirmed with every adjustment of the plan since then, and every update from city staff on the revised budgets, timelines, and plans.

It has taken a long time, and there’s debate each time, but there have been no delays of any kind — as Carroll said in her speech, Mayor John Tory and his allies have won every vote, every time. It has taken a long time, but that is because planning, designing, and building a subway takes a long time. The rest of the process will take a lot longer.

No, LRT proponents have not delayed this subway extension. In fact, as city staff clarified under questioning, the big source of delay came from the other side: if the seven-stop LRT plan had not been shelved and replaced by the subway extension plan, it would be under construction now and would be completed by 2019. (Meanwhile, if the subways-or-bust crowd under Rob Ford hadn’t tried to shelve the Sheppard LRT to attempt a different subway extension, that line would be operating already.) Something for the “get on with it” crowd to chew on.

City staff also clarified something else that might run contrary to widespread perception. In as long as we’ve been having these LRT versus subway debates in this city, the city’s government has never done a side-by-side business case comparison of the two plans in this corridor.

City manager Peter Wallace and Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat were emphatic about this - city council has never asked the professionals who report to them to evaluate the proposals side-by-side, which means essentially that staff have been forbidden from doing so. Repeatedly, Keesmaat clarified that the rationale for the one-stop-plus network plan she presented last year did not come from a comparison of the plan against the LRT alternative, it came from the explicit instructions of city council to build a subway.

So, for all the debate we have had, there have been no delays in the subway process. And for all the debate we’ve had, there has been no professional direct comparison of the alternatives.

During the debate on Tuesday, subway skeptics did not put forward any proposal to delay the process of building the subway extension. But they did put forward a motion to do the side-by-side comparison so that during future debates - as more detailed and accurate information about the subway plan’s costs and projections become available - our government will have some basis for comparison to judge how worthwhile it is.

Now something this delay-free, comparison-free years-long debate has featured a lot of is an aversion to information on the part of the subway advocates. Former mayor Rob Ford set the mould in which regional grievance is the only valid basis for debate, and LRT should be defined as some kind of insult while subways defined as a form of validation. Mayor Tory, and his allies especially including De Baeremaeker, have continued the tradition, going on about what Scarborough “deserves” and about how downtowners who never visit Scarborough want to deprive them of it. The Star this week reported an academic study showing average bus trips would be longer for Scarborough commuters under the subway plan, and TTC staff confirmed Tuesday their own preliminary study shows the same thing. But Tory insisted that would not be the case. “I don’t know how anybody could reach those conclusions” a Globe reporter tweeted him saying on Monday. “I continue to talk to real people,” a Star reporter tweeted he said in justifying his own time estimates. He didn’t call them “folks, folks, folks,” but the same old criteria for evaluating information was obvious.

The Scarborough subway extension has not been delayed, and nothing that happened at the meeting will change that. The comparison to LRT that has never been made will not be made either, as Tory and his team voted down the request for information. No matter how long we discuss this, some things never change.

Other things do change: the cost goes up. The number of expected riders goes down. The Scarborough subway extension, we heard at Tuesday’s meeting, will be a deep tunnel - bored in bedrock to get it under the watery earth and creeks it needs to get past. It’s terminal station will be buried deeper than any other in the system, which is part of why it will be so expensive, it needs so much more concrete, so many more levels in the station. Into this deep tunnel we will pour everything: oodles of money, the opportunity to build other projects to serve the people of Scarborough, years of our lives in debate. A majority of our politicians are not just determined to bury so much in that tunnel, but to consider that there is any other alternative worth even looking at.