Scarborough subway boosters let residents’ imaginations overtake reality

They choose not to draw on actual expected benefits but instead ask people to just close their eyes and dream.

Thestar.com
March 9, 2017
By Edward Keenan

Neethan Shan, the newest member of Toronto city council, trumpeted as a progressive by members of city council’s left, is fond of speculating on how much time the Scarborough subway extension could save people in his neighbourhood. He estimated “half an hour each way” earlier this month, and at the end of a debate at city council on Tuesday, he was saying it’d be 20 to 30 minutes faster each way than the status quo.

As my colleague Jennifer Pagliaro has pointed out, this number appears not to come from any study of the proposal at hand, but instead from the councillor’s imagination.

City staff have provided their own, non-imaginary estimate, based on careful study of what might actually be built. In their report in June, 2016, they estimated the subway would shave five minutes off travel times between Scarborough Town Centre and Kennedy compared to the existing RT, by not stopping in between. There’d be an additional time savings from eliminating the need to transfer between vehicles, which we might guess would be perhaps a minute or two. They didn’t include here estimations of total trip times, since these will vary wildly depending on where a rider starts out. For a rider who lives at Midland and Ellesmere, for instance, who currently walks to Midland RT and will instead have to take a 10-minute bus trip to Scarborough Town Centre to catch the new train, the total trip seems likely to be at least a few minutes longer each way.

But for the vast majority of current riders, who board at either Kennedy or Scarborough Town Centre, and for those who will live in the newly built residences and work in the newly built offices within walking distance of the station we are told this subway project is to inspire, the time savings will be five minutes each way. We can be fairly confident in this estimate, because - unlike, say, how to accurately project costs or anticipate scope changes ordered by politicians - variables like how quickly a vehicle can make a trip without stopping (versus how quickly the current vehicles do make the trip) are fairly well understood by those doing the planning.

Ten minutes a day, for 40,000 current riders and a couple thousand new ones. That’s not bad. Goodness knows our city government justified the $1.5 billion rebuild of the Gardiner Expressway East based on smaller projected time savings than that - and for far fewer people, too. But those numbers, apparently, are not enough for those advocating on behalf of this project.

Wouldn’t it be nice to think you could spend an hour more with your family? Why not pretend a subway can give you that? That’s what Councillor Shan did by talking up the vastly superior, super-fast train of his imagination.

It’s such a cool concept, the mayor decided more people should get into it. During presentations by the public on the proposal, John Tory invited some Scarborough residents to speculate on how much time they thought they might save. One deputant guessed 15 minutes.

Tory told reporters later that he was listening to people’s “lived experience.”

“Well, I guess, you know it’s funny because we have lots of experts and we get lots of reports from them but actually nothing substitutes for the experiences that people among the public actually have on a day-to-day basis,” he said. Ah, yes, the experiences the public has on a day-to-day basis of using infrastructure that has not been built yet. Don’t discount what they tell us about the lives they anticipate they might live a decade from now if a project they may or may not fully understand is built in a way that matches not the plan that exists but the best version of it they hope might come to be.

You could call it “aspirational anecdotal evidence.” Or “faith-based evidence gathering.” The “speculative fiction” approach to projecting transit performance.

“It doesn’t mean that the study is wrong and they’re right. It doesn’t mean that they’re wrong and the study’s right,” the mayor said. “It just means that this is all evidence that you collect with respect to both studies and people’s lived experiences and their expectations about how a subway will possibly impact on their lives.”

Well, for what it’s worth, my lived experience tells me to expect this thing to double in cost again before it is finished. And my expectation for how this subway will possibly impact on all our lives includes the effect of people being disappointed that the project, once complete, saves them far less time than they thought it might contributing to a deeper entrenched cynicism about how expensive political promises fail to match up with reality. And my further expectation is that the money it eats up will prevent the city from building other much-needed projects. I hope I am wrong about all of those things.

I do not expect the city to change its mind on this project. I think that for better or for worse, the subway extension has been debated to exhaustion, and has won the approval, however dubious I find it, of political majorities at multiple levels of government. It’s hard to see it being overturned.

But when the project’s boosters choose not to cite its actual expected benefits but instead encourage people to just close their eyes and imagine something far faster than they are planning to build, I become all the more convinced they have probably made a mistake. If they don’t find the actual facts about their own proposal persuasive enough, why should I?