Let's learn from the mistakes of St. Clair

To the editor:

Recently the Toronto Transit Commission released a report which outlined the problems that have plagued the St. Clair West exclusive right-of-way construction. However, the report merely scratches the surface of the problems with the project as it was conceived and implemented.

Here are a few important lessons that the report missed:

First, public consultation was handled very poorly, much worse than the report suggests. Public consultation should be a collaborative process in which legitimate, thoughtful questions from the community are taken seriously, not merely dismissed as "anti-transit."

The project doesn't significantly improve transit service. Future projects should not be ideologically or politically driven, but instead based on a solid business case and cost-benefit analysis for improving transit. This project was expected to achieve an improvement of 30-seconds per average trip. Although, admittedly, the exclusive right-of-way on St. Clair has strong symbolic value as a demonstration that Toronto is a city that encourages public transit, $106 million is an unconscionable amount to spend on what amounts to a symbolic gesture of support for transit, without a significant actual improvement.

The project's impact on the local community were never taken seriously. These community concerns include the narrowing of sidewalks; the elimination of on-street trees; the increase in local traffic congestion; and the elimination and reduction of St. Clair's strong European-style "patio culture". Emergency vehicles have also been greatly hampered in their ability to respond to local emergencies. This is all in addition to the fact that the construction process has taken years longer than was promised and disrupted the local community massively in the process.

Finally, as noted in the report, proper leadership and supervision of the project was lacking. Many city staff involved in the St. Clair right-of-way construction worked long, thankless hours under difficult circumstances and faced the brunt of the public scorn for mistakes made by their political masters.

The report is nonetheless, a pleasant and overdue vindication for those of us who have been raising these same concerns with the design and implementation of the project dating back to 2002. The ardent supporters of the project on city council have finally admitted that many of the community's concerns were valid all along, even though they denied their existence strenuously in the face of all evidence to the contrary for over five years. Upcoming Transit City projects are far larger and more complicated than St. Clair has been. We can't have any confidence that future projects won't repeat all of these mistakes given that this report seems only to gloss over them. The problems with St. Clair raised in the recent report were in fact, merely the tip of the iceberg.

Councillor Cesar Palacio