Transit projects often fall far short of the promises made
The planners, the politicians and the public, are all swept along in a furious spending binge with no guarantees of success.

thestar.com
By ROYSON JAMES
April 21, 2017

At the core of current angst over the future of transit building in the GTA and environs is this: past and current decisions suggest that the projects we get do not deliver the benefits promised.

The planners, the politicians, the public, all of us are swept along in a furious spending binge with no guarantees of the desired results.

Commuters have demonstrated they will use transit if it is fast, reliable and competitive. We are not talking those who are stuck on the bus because they have no access to a car. The rest of the populace willingly supports transit spending with the expectation the expenditure will improve their commute.

Anyone who pays attention to transit decisions here knows that such faith is misplaced. No jurisdiction is immune. Similar projects all over the world suffer from delusionary projections from planners, false assumptions and political deception.

In his book, The Railway Metropolis, available on Amazon, Torontonian transit planner Michael Schabas delves into the entrails of one of the world’s most celebrated systems, the London transit system over the last 35 years. Schabas exposes more than a few missteps and mistakes. Compared to the TTC, the London transit map evokes envy. Still, Schabas gives London a score of seven out of 10. Toronto?

Up to the 1970s Toronto was “about an eight” - leading the world with such innovations as integrating bus and subway travel, practicing zone fares and the like. Sadly, he says, it’s been downhill ever since - “maybe a three now” - with the chance of rebounding if Metrolinx can implement GO RER (electrification and all-day service) and fare integration with the local transit bodies and insist on positive cost-benefit analyses before backing projects.

“You would have to travel far and wide to find a city” foolish enough to build a one-stop subway to an area that will deliver only 2,000 new passengers and save five minutes - especially when it could have delivered similar benefits by refurbishing and modernizing the Scarborough RT for one-tenth the cost, Schabas says.

He’d said as much in a report he filed for the Neptis foundation - before the final decisions were made on the Scarborough subway. It fell on deaf ears.

So, how do we end up stomaching this, accepting it, praising it, even? Politics, for one.

An LRT is planned from Kennedy station to the Scarborough Town Centre in the late 1970s. The Bill Davis Conservative government replaces it with an experimental made-in-Ontario technology, and the RT is born in 1985 as a demonstration project. TTC staff recommend it be modernized, even as Vancouver races ahead, expanding the RT technology several times. Mayor David Miller proposes the return to the LRT idea in Transit City and the provincial government agrees, funding it 100 per cent. But Rob Ford becomes mayor and before you can say “crack pipe,” a subway is born in the corridor. Looking for votes, the Kathleen Wynne Liberal government flip flops and backs a subway. Then John Tory becomes mayor promising SmartTrack, with multiple GO station stops in Toronto. City staff are mortified. The SmartTrack stations cannibalize the subway stations. So they come up with a gerrymandering solution: bend the subway east to McCowan, not to pick up passengers, but to move it away from SmartTrack. The subway is to make the longest uninterrupted journey on the system. But fewer people have access to it. Bus rides are longer to get to the subway/RT/LRT. Projected passengers volumes drop after council votes the switch. And the cost escalates.

Meanwhile, taxpayers, planners, editors, opinion leaders barely mutter under their breaths.

“Not a single planner has resigned over this,” one former senior planner called to grouse on the day of the vote.

I once challenged a senior city bureaucrat with “Why didn’t you jump up and down in council and tell them how wrong they are?” His answer was, “I told them. What do you want me to do, stand on the table and scream. They know what they are doing. Nothing I say would change their minds.”

And so we are where we are.

The 2005 edition of Journal of American Planning published a comprehensive study across 20 countries and concluded that planners and politicians not only misinform but deceive the public when building large infrastructure projects.

In a follow-up study released in 2009, in the California Management Review, little had changed - costs end up 45 per cent higher than projected; ridership numbers fall 50 per cent lower than forecasted.

“The size and perseverance over time of the problem of misinformation indicate that it will not go away by merely pointing out its existence and appealing to the good will of project promoters and planners to make more accurate forecasts.

“The problem of misinformation is an issue of power and profit and must be dealt with as such, using the mechanisms of transparency and accountability we commonly use in liberal democracies to mitigate rent-seeking behavior and the misuse of power.”

The principal author Bent Flyvbjerg calls this “a violation of their code of ethics - that is, malpractice. Such malpractice should be taken seriously by the responsible institutions. Failing to do so amounts to not taking the profession of planning seriously.”

In essence, the planners have sunk to the level of propagandist politicians, leaving the public at sea.