[URBAN NOTE] "I am not Anti-Subway, I am Pro-Transit"

[rfmcdonald]

James Bow's post makes the point that in the particular circumstances of Toronto, a fetish for building subways to the exclusion of all other methods of mass transit--like, say, surface light rail--is, among other things, a classic example of the pure being the enemy of the good. Yes, subways might be nice, but--questions of financial viability aside--there's such a built-up need to catch up on transit infrastructure that spending money on a new subway line would be a poor use of scarce moneys.

To me, one of the greatest frustrations of Toronto’s rapid transit network is the Scarborough RT. As it stands, it’s a rather useless appendage of the Bloor-Danforth subway — a shuttle between Kennedy station and the Scarborough Town Centre that adds ten minutes of transfer time as most passengers head down four flights of stairs to board the subway. Why was it built as it was? Why wasn’t the Bloor-Danforth subway extended northeast instead?

But if the Scarborough RT had been built as the TTC originally intended it to be built, it wouldn’t just be a useless appendage shuttling people between the Scarborough Town Centre and the end of the Bloor-Danforth subway line. In the 1970s, the TTC, realizing that subway construction was becoming prohibitively expensive, sought a cheaper alternative to bring rapid transit to the lower density suburbs. To them, the solution was obvious: inexpensive streetcars operating on private rights-of-way. Based on the subway-surface model seen in Boston, the Scarborough RT would have been a high-level trunk route, still fully separated from competing traffic, that would have sent streetcars racing to get to the subway. At the Scarborough Town Centre, the streetcars would have continued north and east, branching out, running in the middle of streets, as they followed the tree-like network to its farthest appendages. People as far afield as the Toronto Zoo could have gotten a single seat ride by streetcar to the end of the Bloor-Danforth subway, and the final stretch of their journey would have been very fast indeed.

But it didn’t happen. The province of Ontario wanted the TTC to convert the Scarborough RT into a high-tech transit line using technology that was, at one point, supposed to offer magnetically levitated trains. The magnetic levitation never worked out, and the Scarborough RT vehicles run on wheels instead, but they are pulled by electro-magnets in the middle of the track. The design is elegant, but also complicated and, at the time, untested. The Scarborough RT opened a year late, over $100 million over budget, and had no possibility of being extended out in branches in the middle of major arterial roads.

Imagine what the City of Toronto would have looked like today if the TTC had stuck to its guns in the 1970s, or if the province hadn’t been so enamoured by high-tech that they left a perfectly workable, twentieth-century solution by the wayside. The core subway network in Toronto would be significantly smaller, but it could have been ringed by a network of high speed streetcars operating on grade separated private rights-of-way, as seen in Calgary or Edmonton. They could have stretched all across the suburbs. They were cheaper to build and effective at moving large numbers of people quickly. Unfortunately, that never happened.

How do you correct a thirty-seven year old mistake? Yes, transit expansion needs to happen, but if we hope to catch up on the lost decades of transit growth, the worst idea is to spend far more money than we need to on projects that are well beyond what is needed to serve Torontonians. The surface-subway LRT idea that Karen Stintz wants to see come to Eglinton Avenue has been a long time in coming. It’s time for Mayor Rob Ford to show some real common-sense fiscal conservatism, and let the Eglinton LRT come to the surface to breathe.