Transportation minister won’t say if he pushed for GO station in his riding

$100 million Kirby station in Vaughan will encourage more people to drive, Metrolinx report says.

Thestar.com
March 28, 2017
By Ben Spurr

Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca wouldn’t declare whether he advocated for Metrolinx to approve a new $100-million GO Transit station in his riding, saying only that he has a “collaborative relationship” with the transit agency and that he believes the stop is justified by sound planning.

As the Star reported Monday, last June the Metrolinx board approved a new station in Vaughan at Kirby Rd., despite a government analysis that found adding the stop on the Barrie line would induce more people to drive than take transit and would have negative economic and environmental impacts.

Following his remarks at an unrelated news conference Tuesday morning, a reporter asked Del Duca whether he played a role in advocating for Kirby station.

“As minister of transportation there’s a collaborative relationship that exists between my ministry and the agency responsible for delivering the transit that we need in this region,” said Del Duca, who has represented Vaughan for the Ontario Liberals since 2012.

Asked whether that meant he did advocate for the stop, Del Duca said “That’s the answer that it is. There’s a collaborative relationship.”

Del Duca said there was strong rationale for building the station, and argued that “for the first time in a generation,” the province was “planning to build transit as communities grow, instead of trying to force the transit infrastructure in after the fact.”

“And when you do it (after the fact), you run into a few problems. One is you don’t have the infrastructure in place as the community is growing. Number two is it’s often more disruptive to come back and do it later on. It takes more time, and it’s actually more expensive,” he said.

Del Duca said that the station “will be built in an area that over the next 10 years will see 35,000 new people” living adjacent to it.

The Metrolinx report, which was prepared by a private consultant, projected lower densities around the station, using numbers from a draft secondary plan study that went before Vaughan city council in February 2016. The study projected that at “full build-out” there would be between 19,000 and 26,700 people living in the wider area around the station, known as Block 27.

The Metrolinx report found that at those levels future densities “just meet minimum targets” for regional rail service, but there was “limited opportunity for further growth and intensification in (the) surrounding area.”

Asked for the source of Del Duca’s prediction that the area around Kirby would see 35,000 new residents over the next 10 years, a spokesperson for the minister referred the Star to a June 2016 letter written by Vaughan Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua to the Metrolinx board. The letter referenced the 35,000 figure but not the 10-year time frame.

A Vaughan spokesperson said that Bevilacqua’s estimate was higher than those in the city study and the Metrolinx report because it “benefits from recent work of city of Vaughan planners” and “may have also assumed higher densities being applied to the lands in question based on emerging direction from the province to increase density around transit stations” as part of the Ontario growth plan.

The spokesperson said the Metrolinx projections were prepared before the growth plan draft targets were released and that the city’s analysis took into account a wider catchment area “that includes a (future) population well in excess of 35,000.”

The Metrolinx report was based on a 60-year timeline and determined that adding a station at Kirby would inconvenience “upstream” riders on the Barrie line, compelling 3 per cent of them to switch to automobile use.

It found that the station would cause a net loss of 3.3 million riders, add 688.1 million additional kilometres of car travel to the region’s roads, and lead to increased travel times, traffic congestion, and greenhouse gas emissions. The study concluded that the “benefits which could be realized by a Kirby station are not large enough to outweigh the anticipated negative impacts to GO Transit and the economy.”

Kirby was one of 12 new stations that the Metrolinx board approved in June as part of its 10-year, regional express rail plan. If built, the stop would open in 2024.

A spokesperson for the agency said that “all new stations are at the very early concept stage-and much more study and planning work is required.”