Former planner says transit batting average for GO, province way better than for city hall

“Take all capital investment decisions for transit away from municipal bodies” and boards of “political friends” and leave them to deputy ministers and good staff, advises ex planner.

Thestar.com
April 30, 2017
By Royson James

The single most crippling result of decades of poor transit planning is the average citizen now expects more of the same.

Residents tell pollsters they support a particular transit proposal and they don’t believe it will deliver the benefits touted, and they anticipate the costs will rise - maybe even double, and it will take much longer to complete than forecasts promise.

Around here, commuters discount much of what they hear about transit promises, clinging to scant hope that the traveling experience will improve, even imperceptibly.

At a time when the Toronto region has embarked on an historic spending arc for transit, more money than ever before is at risk of being flushed away.

Everyone can point to a culprit: the idiot politician, in search of votes, who promises subways where improved bus service is appropriate; deceptive planners and their false forecasts; deluded citizens who argue they are owed a subway just because others have one, and the twin devils of deception: the politician-bureaucrat combo boldly arguing the transit equivalent of the Earth is flat.

David Crowley is a retired planner. He used to work for the TTC before he launched out into his own consulting business, which saw him do “demand forecasting” for several of projects.

He has regaled me recently with tales of woe on the state of transit planning.

Sometimes it descends to self-flagellation. Too often forecasted demand falls far short of reality. Too often - as is the case with his experience with the Sheppard subway - his skepticism wasn’t appreciated by his masters.

Now, he watches and weeps and drowns his sorrows with the likes of transit planning legends Dick Soberman and Ed Levy.

“Even where they ‘do it right,’ there are problems, and you can never get totally away from political influence,” he writes.

“My main consulting activity over the last decade or so of working was peer-reviewing demand forecasts based on benchmarking these forecasts against real world experience.

“The big thing that is lacking in all of this is ‘common sense.’

“Everything presented as fact should be assessed against what has been observed in the real world.

“People take model-based results too seriously, especially the professionals.”

So, even the planners are doubting themselves.

They are apoplectic when they talk about political interference - something that’s nearly impossible to avoid.

And they are wisely unsure about solutions that will work.

“My sense is that this sort of wasteful decision should cause average folks, including the taxpayers who will have to pay the bills, to rise up and throw the bums out,” Crowley says of the one-stop subway.

Thanks David, but if that were going to happen the politicians wouldn’t be peddling subways.

The UP Express, the Spadina subway extension, Sheppard subway and the current one-stop Scarborough wonder are examples of how not to build transit.

“Looking over the list I have to take some responsibility for the Sorbara line, in that I did a lot of work in support of that idea for Vaughan and York Region and also the UpExpress (which I was involved in from 2002 to 2014, not that anyone really read and understood what our reports said.) However, we humans are supposed to learn from our mistakes, especially now that we can look back with some objectivity,” he said.

Soberman, for his part, proposes the lesser of two evils as the best source of transit planning, in light of the fact that the politicians are never going to vacate the field.

With one notable exception, namely converting the Scarborough LRT to RT midway through construction at three times the price, provincial decisions about transit in the GTA have, on the whole been more or less sensible, Soberman says.

By province, he does not mean boards of political friends, who, he says, “contribute nothing to decision-making, but have a great time doing so.”

Most productive are the “few people, generally very professional deputy ministers who advise the minister and the government, often with good staff and/or consultants, but, admittedly, not always.

“No ‘boards’ built the first GO service to Pickering; a few smart guys did by convincing the minister of the day.

“When all is said and done, I think the only hope for improvement is to take all capital investment decisions for transit away from municipal bodies and left to the minister(s).

“In other words, don’t participate in joint funding led by municipal hacks.

“Of course, that doesn’t mean all decisions (like building a very expensive tunnel for low capacity transit) will be sensible, but we know that the batting average for GO/Province has been a helluva lot better than we’ve seen or will ever see from the boys and girls of City Hall.”

Arguable, but worth considering.