[URBAN NOTE] "Subway City?"

[rfmcdonald]

Steve Munro is not very happy at all with the development of Toronto's mass-transit system under Mayor Ford's policies.

Queen’s Park will fund the Eglinton line as an underground LRT from Jane Street to Kennedy Station, with an extension over the existing Scarborough RT line’s route replacing the RT technology. This project will cost $8.4-billion and will be completed in 2020.

Toronto will undertake funding for a Sheppard Subway extension west from Yonge to Downsview, and east from Don Mills to Scarborough Town Centre. This project will cost $4.2b and will be completed in 2019. Although this is touted as a public-private partnership, Toronto hopes to raise money from a Federal program for PPPs, “PPP Canada“. However, this program only has an investment of $1.25b. Obviously, much more money will be required from Ottawa if this is to have additional projects beyond a Toronto subway, or conversely the contribution it will make to the Sheppard Subway will be small. It is unclear where the $333m originally announced by Ottawa for the Sheppard LRT will wind up, but this should be clarified in the formal announcement.

What is quite clear in this shuffle is that Queen’s Park has decided to build something, anything on Eglinton as long as they can get shovels in the ground. That the line will now cost billions more than the original subway-surface LRT scheme seems to be of little concern even though “Benefits Case Analysis” was supposed to be at the heart of the Metrolinx Big Move. As usual, the political benefit outweighs all others.

What we have lost, at least for the coming decade, is any hope of a Finch west line, or a line to the airport (other than the premium fare GO-ARL link from Union), or a line to Malvern or UofT’s Scarborough campus.

Beyond that, Metrolinx and Queen’s Park must wrestle with the “Investment Strategy”, a fancy word for whatever new taxes or revenue generation mechanisms will be used to build the rest of The Big Move. Major expansions of GO, the proposed Richmond Hill subway extension (and all of its follow-on projects to relieve subway capacity limits), and a host of projects in the 905 are all queued up waiting for money.

As for Sheppard, the real problem is to make the numbers work out. I have already commented at length on this, and won’t belabour the point. In brief, $4.2b is a lot to raise from development charges or other similar schemes, and much greater densities will be needed on Sheppard than on traditional suburban arterials to pay for this scheme.

While everyone celebrates this new era in transit, let us not forget the TTC’s operating and capital budget crunch which I detailed in previous articles. None of this money addresses the needs of the existing system for ongoing repairs and renovation, nor does it provide money to relieve the pressure on service capacity. Later this year, we will doubtless see another proposal to cut marginal services “for the greater good”, but they will have to be much more substantial given the expected shortfall in TTC funding. A fare increase, probably a big one, will be needed to make up for the lack of a smaller jump in 2011.

It's worth noting that this transit system will also leave the peripheries of Toronto neglected by fixed-line mass transit routes. The "Three Torontos" reproduce themselves again.