Transit advocates see candidates' plans as wanting.
King 504 streetcar.
Staff photo/DAVID NICKLE
Bruce McQuaig had been on the job exactly seven days as the new head of Metrolinx, the morning he got up to tell the Toronto Board of Trade the news.
In spite of everything that's come out in the Toronto mayoralty campaign over the past months - about subways, streetcars (or lack thereof) and light rail realignments - Transit City is still a go. Toronto is still on track to see what the provincial government has promised and Toronto Council endorsed: light rail lines along Sheppard Avenue by 2014, on Finch Avenue West by 2019, along Eglinton Avenue by 2020, along with a new LRV-serviced Scarborough RT line by 2020.
"Our focus is on delivering on the Big Move, which is the plan that has been endorsed by municipal councils and funded by the province," he told reporters after the breakfast speech. "Part of the Big Move is delivering on the big projects. The Sheppard LRT construction has started already - we're focused on delivering that project. We realize there's a conversation going on, but construction is underway."
"A conversation" is one way to describe the varied transit talk helping fuel Toronto's high-octane mayoralty race.
The transit platforms put forward by Toronto's mayoralty candidates are more properly a pile-on, on the David Miller/Dalton McGuinty devised Transit City light rail scheme. Only Joe Pantalone, Miller's deputy mayor, has backed Transit City in its original, $11 billion form.
Sarah Thomson has promised a wide network of subways, funded by road tolls. George Smitherman has pledged an altered light rail network augmented by subway extensions and the replacement of the Scarborough RT with an actual subway. Rocco Rossi says he'll sell off assets like Toronto Hydro to pay off debt, and let the city get down to building more subways. And Rob Ford is promising to build two new subway lines in Scarborough - one along Sheppard, another along the Scarborough RT line - and shut down Toronto's streetcar network.
The breadth of the plans and their willful departure from Transit City have Toronto transit watchers slapping their foreheads.
Paul Bedford, Toronto's former chief planner and current member of the Metrolinx board of directors, said it was unlikely any of those candidates' plans would see implementation.
"The councils have all approved it, the province has approved it, everybody's approved it," he said. "There's no way we're going to go backwards. We're not going to do it. Sheppard's underway, the cars are ordered."
Public transit consultant Richard Soberman agreed that altering the Metrolinx shopping list is "not on." But he pointed out that it's possible to just stop it.
"We've been there before," he said, recalling the 1995 election in which Mike Harris' Progressive Conservatives defeated Bob Rae's New Democrats, who had proposed a massive transit expansion that included a subway along Eglinton Avenue. The TTC had already begun digging the hole for the tunnel when the government changed, and the project was scrapped.
"The last time when we got a new government, we'd started building the Eglinton subway - and then it was cancelled," he said. "I consider that to be one of the lousiest decisions ever made by a provincial government. And now, here we are 15 years later - and now we're finally talking about opening up what we covered up."
In other words, change - and retrenchment - have happened before. It will take more than a new mayor to affect that change. But this election, the mayors-in-waiting are making it clear they're aiming to try.
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Public transit advocate Steve Munro has been on the inside and the outside of TTC transit planning - critiquing the TTC's plans and operations from the outside as a blogger and advocate, and on the inside, helping Mayor Miller's team draw the map for Transit City.
He's looked at all the plans - even Pantalone's, which is the only one to wholly preserve Transit City - and pronounced them wanting.
"They're all small," Munro said. "And small isn't a question of drawing lines on maps. You can draw lines on maps and say you're going to start building a subway. But look at how long it took to get the Spadina subway built. We're just now having a competition to name the tunnel boring machines - and it might be open to York University in time for the Pan Am Games."
He said the plans he's seen so far need more than lines on a map - they need to form a growing network.
"Rossi's plan, Smitherman's plan, Ford's plan, Thomson's plan basically consists of a few subway lines - but it's not a network," he said. "The first five years of his plan (Pantalone's) is already what's under construction. His vision is 'Gee, I'll show up for these ribbon cuttings.'"
Smitherman's plan would, by the campaign's estimates, cost $17.5 billion - and in its second phase consist of more than Transit City light rail lines. It would build 20 new kilometres of subways and make small changes to the Transit City lines. It would build transit to the port lands, close the link between Sheppard and Downsview stations, and stretch the Bloor-Danforth line to Sherway Gardens in Etobicoke. It would also, like Rob Ford's plan, replace the Scarborough RT mini train with a full-sized subway train, rather than light rail as Metrolinx is contemplating..
That's problematic. According to the TTC, the right of way that exists is too narrow in places and turns too sharply for full-sized subway trains. The existing elevated track couldn't be used, and it's likely the TTC would have to expropriate land.
Ford released his transit plan earlier this month, via YouTube and his campaign website.
Ford says he would scrap the work already done on the Sheppard LRT and build a subway instead - about 12 kilometres of new track between Don Mills and the Scarborough Town Centre, and a new length of track hooking up Sheppard station on the Yonge line with Downsview station to the west. That would cost $3 billion. And he would spend $1 billion to turn the Scarborough RT into a subway. He has also promised to get rid of streetcars, replacing them with energy-efficient buses.
That last plan has attracted scorn from transit advocates.
Bedford said the decision would be disastrous for Toronto's transit infrastructure.
"Very simply, streetcars are the urban workhorses of dense cities all over the world," he said. "Toronto was very fortunate. We almost got rid of them in the early 1970s. No one I've met doesn't like riding streetcars - especially in their own right of ways. But the main thing is their carrying capacity. If you add up the number of people who use the King, Queen, Spadina and probably College streetcars - just four routes - that equals more than the number of people who ride the entire GTA GO system every day. Just on four streetcar routes. They're out of their minds to get rid of that."
Munro, meanwhile, points out that Ford's subway expansion plan doesn't add up, because the estimate of $200 million a kilometre is too low.
"He's using $200 million a kilometre. The construction cost is $300 million a kilometre for subways," said Munro. "It's $2.6 billion to get a subway from Downsview station to Vaughan, and that's a little over eight kilometres. That's $300 million, full stop."
Thomson's plan to build $14 billion worth of subways - paid for in large part by tolls on the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway, and help from the province. She believes that would raise between $400 and $500 million each year - which would over time pay for the large-scale subway expansion, along Eglinton and Sheppard, and include a downtown relief line along Queen Street.
Munro praised the plan as being the only one that preserves the original Eglinton proposal. But he said the plan falls into what he sees as a fallacy of falling into subways as a general cure-all - particularly subway trains that go to the edge of the city.
"At some point the subway has to end," he said. "The Yonge subway cannot go to North Bay. There are two reasons for building subways - one is for outward expansion and the other is for filling in the grid of what we already have. They perform different functions. If you push out, you're expanding the catchment system."
Munro said that by pushing subways out too far, the TTC finds itself doing the work that GO Transit's commuter rail system should be doing. "One of the problems that we have is the way that people think in the 416-905 border area," he said. "GO is expensive and infrequent - the TTC, cheap and frequent."
Pushing full-service subways to the borderlands means that the TTC will itself be taking on that regional role. So the 905 municipalities are going to get a subway built for them, for next to nothing - the subway will be in the TTC fare zone," he said.
Rossi is planning subways too - 20 kilometres over the next decade, paid for by selling assets such as Toronto Hydro and paying down the city's debt, so the city's $450 million debt charge could be put to subway construction and new buses instead. Once again, scrapping Transit City to do so.
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And there is the problem. Transit City is continuing, based on a consensus between the province, Toronto Council and Greater Toronto Area councils.
Bedford said subway plans are good - at least in the small areas.
"I don't mind filling in missing pieces of the subway - you could make a planning case to extend the subway between Yonge and Downsview - the track already goes half way there now," he said. "You could give relief on the Yonge line. But in terms of, you know, these other ideas? Where are their heads?"
The question has come up on the ground too.
Mark Bozian owns Brimmell Toyota on Sheppard Avenue East, and represents the Sheppard East Village BIA. He and the group have been working hard with the TTC, trying to figure out a way to make the Sheppard LRT work for businesses worried what the dedicated lanes will do to vehicle access, and what the prospects of long-running construction will do to their bottom lines.
"Well, I guess from our perspective as a BIA we've simply been working with what we were told was going to be the transit solution on Sheppard Avenue," he said. "We weren't asked what we wanted. We were told it was going to be an LRT, and that became our number one issue."
Now, as work starts, Bozian said the businesses along Sheppard are satisfied with the work the TTC has done with the business community - and they're resigned to making the system work.
But when asked whether he, personally, would rather see a subway along Sheppard, all things considered?
"I'd personally prefer a subway," he said. "And I say that because I'm being selfish - any time you can prevent traffic mayhem of any scope or size. But that's a perfect world statement."