WATCHDOG: 'Secret' TTC report undermines Mayor Ford's transit plan

Over the past week a TTC report has surfaced that appears to completely contradict the rationale that Mayor Rob Ford put forward for cancelling the Transit City plan.

Ford's replacement for Transit City was what he claimed to be best for the city and what taxpayers wanted. That was continuation of the subway along Sheppard Avenue to the Scarborough Town Centre, which Ford said could be built with private funding, and the building of an underground LRT along Eglinton Avenue.

What is important about the new TTC report is that it outlines the reasons why the Transit City plan had changed the city's transit emphasis from subways to LRT. If you remember my column from Feb, 2, I wrote about the TTC planning report published in the early 1980s called Network 2011. That report recommended several new subways and these were to be the Eglinton West, the Sheppard East and Downtown Relief lines.

As I had also mentioned in that column, by 1985 the TTC and the province had already seen that such subways were no longer economically feasible and LRT systems were the way of the future.

The new report, which was produced in 2010, shows that the city's growth patterns have not followed the projections made in the 1980s.

Putting it simply, the estimated number of jobs, which were to have been created, by this time were over-estimated by a great degree. More importantly, the job development patterns for Scarborough had not only failed to materialize, the area had seen a net drop in jobs.

The reality of Toronto in 2012 is that employment continues to be focused in Toronto's downtown core and that large numbers of people, who hold these jobs, live outside of the city.

Those who do live and work in Toronto have their homes spread out through the city and work across the GTA.

As a result, if Ford's transit plan goes through, it will be based upon obsolete information and will not have the ridership needed to justify its cost. Worse, the tunnelling of the Eglinton LRT will eliminate its cost efficiencies and handicap the building of other much needed LRT routes.