We are meant to celebrate this week in Hogtown.
Transit City, or a portion of it far in excess of nothing at all, is going ahead. It awaits, at this writing, nothing more than routine ministerial approval, after the Metrolinx board of directors supported the bold - measuredly bold - no, let's call it bold, plan.
With that approval, billions of dollars of provincial money will be delivered at a rate somewhat in excess of a hospital IV drip. And within the lifetimes of many of us, light rail transit will come to some parts of Toronto that don't have it now.
Many years later, if the stars align and somebody has the guts to toll the Gardiner Expressway, other parts of Toronto may see that light rail transit extended to them.
We could break out champagne, but really a damp tea bag shared around four Dixie cups of warm tapwater seems more appropriate.
Understandably, Metrolinx's president Robert Prichard has been working hard to promote the plan - dubbed 5 in 10 - as a win for Toronto. It isn't that difficult to do so: he and Metrolinx are themselves blameless for the cut of $4 billion from the $8.15 billion plan. That is a political decision at the provincial level.
And the plan does deliver some light rail transit to areas that will benefit from it. Funded is an extension of the Sheppard subway route on light rail, from Don Mills Station to the Conlins Yard. The Eglinton cross town route will extend from Jane Street in the west to Kennedy Station in the east. Sheppard will be finished by 2014, in time for the Pan Am Games a year later. That line is delayed by a year. Eglinton is delayed somewhat longer - it will open two years after it was originally intended.
The other lines - Finch West, and the rebuild of the crumbling Scarborough RT, aren't funded right now, and the only guarantee they'll start work in 2015 is because Metrolinx has budgeted about $170 million for preliminary work on them over the next few years.
This certainly shows intent. But earlier transportation planners also showed intent, expropriating houses in the Beach and north-western Toronto, to build extensions of Hwy. 401 and Spadina Avenue, respectively, that fell off the planning ledger. The Eglinton subway has already been dug and filled in once, after governments changed, and changed their minds about spending money on transit in Toronto.
Metrolinx has established good, after-the-fact set of rationales for delaying those lines. On Finch it makes sense to wait until there is a Spadina subway extension to York Region and the light rail can link up there. And as to Scarborough's RT - well, it's better not to risk having the busy transit route under construction in 2015 when the Pan Am Games are in Scarborough at the new aquatics centre.
This is all very logical.
But it's cold comfort to the communities at the far ends of Scarborough and Etobicoke that will have to wait five years to find out whether they're waiting a decade for transit that they need right now.
Rexdale might never see light rail along Finch. It's less uncertain for Scarborough residents, because the existing SRT is in such poor repair. The TTC will already be spending money to keep the antique light rail line operating safely for a year longer and no one is likely to see it shut down without a replacement in line.
It rankles, though, that Toronto's win of the Pan Am Games actually provides a pretext for delaying infrastructure that communities in Scarborough need now. Big international sports events are supposed to speed up infrastructure improvements, not slow them down.
Paul Bedford, Toronto's former chief planner and author of the city's light-rail-dependant Official Plan, sits on the board of Metrolinx now.
Before casting his vote in favour of the plan, he wryly noted transit planning in Toronto is "torture." It took four decades, starting a century ago, to start building subways. When the Bloor-Danforth subway line was first built it only ran from Keele Street to Woodbine Avenue. Nothing comes fast in this town.
So in that spirit, let us raise our Dixie cups and celebrate our measured, qualified, and patently insufficient success.